The Best Sweet Potato Biscuits Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret to an excellent biscuit? ›

Use Cold Butter for Biscuits

For flaky layers, use cold butter. When you cut in the butter, you have coarse crumbs of butter coated with flour. When the biscuit bakes, the butter will melt, releasing steam and creating pockets of air. This makes the biscuits airy and flaky on the inside.

The butter version rises the highest — look at those flaky layers! The shortening biscuit is slightly shorter and a bit drier, too. Butter contains a bit of water, which helps create steam and gives baked goods a boost.

Use good butter and dairy

Because biscuit recipes call for so few ingredients, it's important that every one is high quality—you'll really taste the difference. Catherine recommends splurging a bit on a grass-fed butter or European-style butter (now's the time to reach for Kerrygold!).

TIPS & TRICKS to Make this Recipe: The main secrets to achieving that incredible crispy texture, is to soak the cut sweet potatoes in cold water for at least 30 minutes. This helps remove the starch from the sweet potatoes so they´re not limp & soggy.

Strains of soft winter wheat have less protein than the hard spring wheat and therefore southern all-purpose flours are better-suited for quick breads such as biscuits, cakes and muffins.

Parle G: the King of Biscuits.

Heavy Cream.

The heavy cream adds flavor to the biscuit by adding a little more fat and helps hydrate the dough. The extra fat in the heavy cream is helpful because buttermilk in stores is often “low-fat” buttermilk.

*Substitute buttermilk, light cream, or heavy cream for the whole milk, if you prefer; use enough of whatever liquid you choose to bring the dough together readily, without you having to work it too much. The higher-fat liquid you use, the more tender and richer-tasting your biscuits will be.

Conclusion: More baking powder makes the biscuit rise more (imagine that!). About 1 tablespoon of baking powder per 2 cups of flour seems to be about the right amount, but even halving or doubling this amount should not ruin your biscuits.

Mason Dixie Biscuit Co.

And the flavors were more from-scratch as well. According to Josh Rink in the Test Kitchen, “This brand feels like it uses real ingredients like a homemade biscuit.” And Josh is right: Flour, buttermilk, butter, milk, sugar, baking powder and salt are the only ingredients Mason Dixie Biscuit Co.

What is the Southern flour for biscuits? ›

If you start asking around, any Southern chef, Southern Living Test Kitchen pro, or biscuit-making family member will swear by White Lily flour. Generations of bakers have claimed it as the secret to the perfect, flaky biscuit.

To enhance store-bought biscuits, opt for flaky layers-style ones, separate the layers, and add ½ ounce of sliced cheese between each biscuit layer inside a muffin tin.

Yams and sweet potatoes differ in flavor and appearance, and they are not related. Sweet potatoes are in the morning glory family, while yams belong to the lily family. Yams aren't as sweet as sweet potatoes, and they are starchier and drier. Their texture and flavor are more similar to potatoes or yuca.

Do you have to poke holes in sweet potatoes before baking? Typically holes are poked into a sweet potato to prevent a potato exploding in your oven. However, the chance of that happening is low, and according to Lifehacker, sweet potatoes will retain more flavor if you don't poke them.

Soaking potatoes in water helps remove excess starch. Excess starch can inhibit the potatoes from cooking evenly as well as creating a gummy or sticky texture on the outside of your potatoes. Cold water is used because hot water would react with the starch activating it, making it harder to separate from the potatoes.

Fat is also important because it adds tenderness to the dough; full-fat buttermilk and European-style butter can help with texture, but "full-fat" is the critical point — sour cream, olive oil, and nut milks can all be used to create successful biscuits, provided they have a high-fat content.

The two keys to success in making the best biscuits are handling the dough as little as possible as well as using very cold solid fat (butter, shortening, or lard) and cold liquid. When the biscuits hit the oven, the cold liquid will start to evaporate creating steam which will help our biscuits get very tall.

As it turns out, adding hard-boiled egg yolks to your biscuit dough is a way to ward off an overworked, tough dough that can be the downfall of a butter-based pastry. When the trick is employed, the pastry shatters and then dissolves in your mouth quickly, tasting like a knob of flaky butter.

Whenever you're working with buttery doughs like biscuits, pie crust, shortbread, and the like, you're constantly reminded to chill the dough frequently, as well as chill the dough before baking time. Baking biscuits directly from frozen also keeps the biscuits from spreading and flattening out.